Travis Collinson

"Scatter"   48" X 48"   Acrylic, Oil, collage and mixed media on canvas   2013

detail of painting above.

Travis Collinson's figurative paintings immediately bring to mind the early work of Lucian Freud. Which is certainly not meant to dismiss is at derivative. Visual artists should take more cues from musicians and be unmindful of the criticism of influence. Embrace it. Run with it. And if you're going to be influenced by a recent painter you could do far worse than Lucian Freud. Also this kind of quirky tight stylization is something that Mr. Freud left off in favor of a more painterly approach. But Travis Collinson has found within it a way to evoke the powerful but subtle landscapes of his subject's interior emotional lives. That subject is often himself. The distortions have only a distant relationship to caricature (which is nothing more than a form of lighthearted humorous portraiture). In Mr. Collinson's work the odd angles, the enlarged eyes and skewed facial features amount to a reflection of the discrepancies and inconsistencies within us all. When we look at his figures we do not just see the person, we are drawn into them. But even his still life work reflects some of this ability to emote with drawing. A napkin, a lemon and a small potted succulent seem to convey a range of emotions, of dislocation, alienation, and a tender surprise at the beauty of the banal and ordinary. Some of his work pushes into more explicitly narrative territory and that is usually where my interest is. But for some reason it is these quieter pieces, especially the portraits that affect me the most with their quiet complexity.

You can see a bit more of his work at www.maloneyfineart.com or at www.eliridgway.com
He also has a gallery of images on his Facebook page which is open to viewing (this is where I got most of these images. They were not labelled or titled in any way which is why I do not have any information attached to them)